The Earth’s Moon had a rough start in life. Formed from a chunk of the Earth that was lopped off during a planetary collision, it spent its early years covered by a roiling global ocean of molten magma before cooling and forming the serene surface we know today.

A research team, led by Nick Dygert, assistant professor in the UT Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, took to the lab to recreate the magmatic melt that once formed the lunar surface and uncovered new insights on how the modern moonscape came to be. Their study shows that the Moon’s crust initially formed from rock floating to the surface of the magma ocean and cooling. However, the team also found that one of the great mysteries of the lunar body’s formation – how it could develop a crust composed of just one mineral – cannot be explained by the initial crust formation and must have been the result of some secondary event.

A specialist in 20th-century modernism, Seshagiri aims to prepare the first scholarly edition of Virginia Woolf’s memoir A Sketch of the Past.

“Despite its decades-long canonical status, this posthumously published autobiography has never been edited, annotated, or introduced for contemporary scholars,” Seshagiri says. “A scholarly text of A Sketch of the Past would establish Woolf’s artistic conception of the memoir, which is not fully visible in its current form.”